The sex of the child should not go on the birth certificate

The use of the 'intersex' argument to argue trans issues assumes that among those with a DSD all the females will be assigned male and all the males assigned female. And that simply isn't true.

The tiny subset of babies born with a DSD will contain an even tinier subset who may wrongly 'assigned'. It's a vanishingly small number which doesn't warrant the changes to our systems some seem to think we need.

I suspect if this person was in need of a surrogate they would know full well what a female is. When we say men have babies, we all know which ones.

Babies have slightly different growth charts based on sex.

Females normally get periods starting as teens and not getting them could be a sign of Dsd, reproductive issues or anorexia etc.

A male teenager spontaneously growing large breasts would raise some health concerns.

We have different bodies ffs!

I have a friend with a DSD. It was discovered precisely because she is female and her periods didn't start. If she had not been recognized as female at birth and thereafter expected to begin menstruation, her condition would not have been discovered.

Berthatydfil - if the genitals are different from the chromosomes, then Intersex would be most appropriate, but I don’t know what is done currently.

I had 3 amino centices (sp??) so the xx/xy chromosomes were known before birth.
How would these births be recorded as the sex of each baby would be evidenced by a source other than observation of the genitals?

It makes no sense to not record the sex of a baby.
The cases of intersex are incredibly rare and in the vast majority of cases it is easy to determine the baby's sex before registration.
Males and females have different healthcare needs - it's important that information is recorded as a fact.

I think this is a case of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The sex being stated on a birth certificate works pretty well for the vast, vast majority of the population.

Woops

Blah blah like this gets churned out with the objective of convincing people that male humans are simultaneously female and vice versa and some are neither. it's incoherent tosh.

Honestly, that is a terrible lot of nonsense. The blah blah l

I should say there is of course no threshold to cross to become 'important'. I merely raise it to note how strange it would be to put babies into a dark/light hair dichotomy or bring back the forcing of children to write with the right hand when some are left-handed.

As others have pointed out sex has serious medical consequences.

I merely raise this because again your friend's posterior seems to be doing a lot of talking.

The red hair statistic is false

Yes, anyone who quotes this is speaking out of their posterior.

1. It's based on a 2% estimate that includes any DSD, regardless of whether its the kind of DSD that would make sex unclear

2. Red hair is rare so the statistic is misleading. It's estimated that 1-2% of people world wide have red hair, but in the UK we perceive it as relatively normal because e.g. in Scotland and Ireland about 10% of people have red hair.

As for differing medical needs, it should be clear from the above that a wrong assumption about someone sex could indeed lead to a misunderstanding of their physical needs and abilities and, if anything, should be a reason not to assume it for the birth certificate.

If people are regularly receiving incorrect medical treatment because they have a DSD, then the answer is to run additional tests on all babies at birth. However, I suspect the reason this isn't done is that sex is almost always observed correctly.

We also don't have any insight into what will happen to each baby physically when they reach puberty

We really do have a lot of insight into what will happen to each baby at puberty, and this is why we don't take all girls to A&E when they have their first period.

OP, I think your friend is greatly over estimating the incidence of DSDs that would make it difficult to determine sex.

Your friend is also misunderstanding the point of a birth certificate, which is a copy of information held by the registrar. A birth is a matter of public record, and the information is not just recorded for the person who has just been born.

Sex isn't assumed at birth it is observed.

Correct. What is assumed is this nebulous thing called 'gender'. As soon as the baby's - or even the foetus's - sex is known, gender stereotypes are assumed and imposed upon them. Which of us was not gifted dainty, impractical, pink and pastel, flower-adorned frocks upon the announcement that our baby was a girl? Which of us 2nd or 3rd timers didn't hear "Bet you're looking forward to a nice, quiet little girl after those tearaway boys of yours"? There are always threads on here asking "AIBU to put 3m ds in tights when the weather is cold?".

No, sex is not assigned, but gender stereotypes are.

That's what feminists are fighting against, and what TRAs and MRAs are fighting for.

Your friend sounds like a pretentious fool, OP. Can you not just mute/ unfriend?

Sex isn't assumed at birth it is observed. Medical staff don't need to do extra tests to check sex as it's obvious when a child is born.

Intersex conditions are very rare.

Can't really be bothered to engage with what I strongly suspect are heavily manipulated facts, but world-wide, red hair actually is fairly uncommon.

This is eerily similar to prior historical and ancient descents into Dark Ages.
An ideology takes control and part of it is to undo all scientific and reason progress in a civilisation. The civilisation then collapses.

As others have said, disorders where one truly cannot determine sex by the external genitalia are very, very rare. Male & female infants do have some different health needs- as they said at my ante-natal class, with boy babies you need to lift up the little testicles on changing a pooy nappy to
make sure no poo is hiding there! More seriously, males also need to be screened for undescended testicles as this is a major cancer risk. Plus growth rates for male & female babies are different, so knowing sex is essential for picking up failure to thrive or abnormal head circumference. There are real potential adverse health consequences to ignoring what sex a child is.

I don’t think this is very sensible. Although sex as determined by external genitalia does not always correlate with with DNA or hormone profile, it is a cheap and effective proxy most of the time. Are we going to spend a large amount of money to do a dna test for marginal gain?

It will often correlate with disease risk profile, growth curves of babies etc.

In addition it is important for govt statistics to check on sex selective abortion (as mentioned by pp’s), planning ahead (eg what is burden of cardiovascular disease likely to be in 50 years time).

If a baby or child has medically diagnosed intersex condition at birth - I don’t see why they should not have Intersex recorded.

Registering a birth isn't just for the sake of the child. We need to know how many males and females are being born.

Its a bit odd that your friend is so well informed but still doesn't know that people who discover they have a DSD can have their birth certificate amended.

What really annoys me is that the outright lie that 1.7 % of the population has a DSD condition is perpetuated by organisations such as the BBC and Amnesty. The BBC know its a lie as they did their own fact check on it!!!

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000222z

Also, birth certificates aren't issued at birth. There is no rush to 'assign' a sex. In the UK birth certificates are issued up to 6w after birth, by which time any visible anomalies will have been assessed and the baby's sex ascertained by genetic testing.

As for

a widely touted stat is that it is about as common as having red hair.

Well, if you go by Stoewall's definition of trans, then that is nonsense - being trans would be as common as having hair.

And if you go by the definition of wanting society to perceive you and treat you as a member of the opposite sex, being trans would be even less common than being Jewish (about 0.2% of world population).

Being left handed is about as common as having red hair.

bring back the forcing of children to write with the right hand when some are left-handed. Why do that when we don't have to?"

To ensure that men know who to subjugate because their biology - you know, that child-bearing, lower muscle-mass stuff - will make it harder for them to fight back.

Around 750,000 babies are born in the UK each year.
150 children are diagnosed with a disorder of sexual development each year. (*source:
differently-normal.com/2020/06/10/example-post-3/amp/?__twitter_impression=true)

Be in no doubt this issue is being used to undermine sex based protections. Actual people with intersex conditions seem to be pretty pissed off about it all.